


Zake's Harp

by yhlee (etothey)



Category: Windrose Chronicles - Barbara Hambly
Genre: F/M, Music, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-11-29
Updated: 2010-11-29
Packaged: 2017-10-13 10:45:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,027
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/136467
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/etothey/pseuds/yhlee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Zake, a sasennan, and a harp: the importance of music.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Zake's Harp

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Nestra](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nestra/gifts).



"So tell me," the sasennan Nia said, leaning back into the curve of Zake's arm like a very pleased cat, "why the harp?"

Zake said mildly, "Why not?" They were out in the woods, in the shadow of a slender maple that liked to whisper to them of clear cold pebbles of rain and the scratching of birds in its branches. She had hinted that she liked to dance, even beyond the controlled clashing of bamboo on bamboo in training. He'd told her that the only dances he knew were the rowdy ones in the old taverns, spinning a girl to the stamping of feet and the clapping of hands and the occasional splash of spilled beer. And then, once they were in the hands of the earth and the wind, she had suggested another dance altogether.

There had been a time when he'd have tensed at the question, hearing the sneers. He hadn't tried to lose the Angelshand drawl, knowing that the other first-years would scent his past on him beyond the telling of it, that you couldn't lose the marrow-deep tracework of your past, the way Lady Rosamund could have been dressed in tatters and set down ragged in the poorest quarter of the world's poorest city and still that hauteur would glint from her like a knife.

It wasn't that the imputation had stopped mattering. It was that he had something more important to hold him steady.

"Play for me, then," Nia said. She was smiling lazily, although as a sparring partner there was nothing lazy about her. "Something bawdy. Something true."

"They're often not the same thing, you know," Zake said drily.

The harp he liked best was his master Otaro's triple harp, because it thrilled into his touch when he went to tune every one of its ninety-eight gleaming strings. Otaro said sometimes, with more affection than exasperation, that its notes went out of true just to have Zake tune them shining into song. The harp had not given him its name, which wouldn't be proper, but it had told the stories of dark brave queens riding forth to battle and lovers entwined in the sea of stars and cunning foxes that smiled human smiles as they gave tangly advice to lost travelers. It sang the brilliant chaconnes favored in the music-houses of Angelshand. And then, without any condescension, it took the rough drinking songs of the slums where Zake had grown up and made them more beautiful than themselves.

Although it would have been an interesting prank to conjure Otaro's harp out of his own hands where he would be playing it after supper, Zake decided that he had spent as much time as he cared to copying out those tables of logarithms to a hundred places under his master's watchful eye after the previous prank, which had involved a butter churn and three cats. Instead, he eased himself free of Nia, who made no noise of protest, and knelt to draw a Circle in the earth and cool mosses and the furtive sorrel. He traced the signs of the stars Raith and Elene and Iri-i, high guardians of music, and asked their blessing; and then, he tilted his magic into the Circle, as sweet and easy as a butterfly's kiss.

The harp that formed in his hands was made of evening shadows and strung with the wind's own inconstant breath. It would not last past an hour. It was not meant to. But it was his and it was beautiful.

Nia was young for a sasennan, and old in the ways of magic--it was impossible to be sworn to the Council without becoming very rapidly inured to stray magics large and small--but her smile was genuine. "Bet you it'll play nothing but riddles for the cats," she said.

Zake bent over the harp and did his best impression of a caterwaul, which, considering the harp's inability to glide up and down pitches, was not very. But it turned Nia's smile into a laugh, which was a worthwhile magic all in itself. Then he played a bawdy song, as she had requested, which he had learned on the docks, an unlikely romance between a mermaid and an amorous fishnet. Zake had always liked its rollicking rhythms, and thought that it had probably been written by someone intimately familiar with the sea's moods. Some songs, he had learned from Otaro, had started their lives as court lays and ended up cheerfully adulterated, their words replaced entirely; this one was probably not one of them.

"That one that Otaro likes to play when the winds blow cold," Nia said suddenly. "Do you know it? I've never heard you play it."

Zake struck an approximation of the first bright arpeggios from the strings, and she quirked an eyebrow at him. "I know it," he said, although she looked skeptical. "That one was written by the Arella of the Roses. After she lost her hand fightin' the Dragon of the Stormless Waters, all her music was played by magic. Although it's up to you whether you want to grow four extra fingers or pluck the strings with your mind."

She waited, knowing there was more, and knowing just as well that he would tell her if she just waited.

"Magic's the hearth in winter and the compass star at sea," Zake said, reflecting that Nia had probably heard a great many mageborn try to explain the peculiar singing call of magic. "It's the thing I have to have. But it's not the only thing that's beautiful. Or important." He tipped his head away from her, not wanting to see her amused or tolerant or baffled. "I try to remember that."

He swept his hand down the strings, a cascade of dissonant notes. After a moment he looked at her again, and saw the unexpected warmth of understanding in her eyes, both sweet and bitter.

"I know," Nia said. "It's the sword for me. But I know."

Theirs would never be one of the grand passions out of ballads, it was true. But here and now, they understood each other, and it was enough.

**Author's Note:**

> I hope that the year brings you kindness and warmth and music, in whatever proportion you deem desirable.


End file.
